Sand In My Shoes
by Nightheart
Summary: Based on song by Al Stewart later covered by Dido . A follow up to "Adrift": Meryl returns home to discover that nothing has changed but... her.


_**Sorry it took so long to get anything at all posted, I have both classes and work this semester so things are more than a little hectic, and most of the time I do spend writing I spend writing on my other Trigun fic (the one I really want to write) instead of Home. I'd been toying with this notion as a songfic and finally got around to writng it about two weeks ago, but it needed some editing and cleaning up and I didn't get to that until just now. So... enjoy.**_

& & &

_Two weeks away  
it feels like the whole world should have changed,  
but I'm home now,  
and things still look the same._

She let out a sigh as she pushed the door of her little home shut behind her and looked around the room. It still looked exactly as she had left it, excepting that her ficus was dead and rotting away in the corner and there was a small layer of dust over everything. But the room with it's neat elegant furniture, matching drapery and faux-wood flooring warmed by an area rug was the same.

Standing at the threshold and feeling strangely reluctant to go in, Merly surveyed the room before her, looking for something, anything, that was out of place. She had the feeling that the room that she had left a little over a year ago should have changed in her absence, that there should be something differnt about it but no matter how she scrutinized the dust-covered surfaces before her everything was exactly as she had left it. It was she who was different.

Meryl looked down at herself, she didn't look any different, she still wore the same clothes that she always had, the neat office blouse and skirt, the fitted leggings, the over-jacket, all were the same things she had always worn to her wokr since the day she'd been hired on as a proffessional. Her hair was the same, she wore her make-up the same way but there was something differnt about her and she couldn't put her finger on it. Her life felt like an old sweater that had once been a most comfortable and beloved garment, but had shrunk in the wash and now squeezed just a little too tightly.

_I think I'll leave it to tomorrow to unpack  
__try to forget for one more night that I'm back in my flat  
by the road where the cars never stop going through the night  
to a life where I can't watch the sunset,  
I don't have time... I don't have time. _

She was tired from the long journey back to December... well that wasn't exactly accurate, she'd been tired long before then. Milly had caught onto it, but had graciously deigned not to bring it up. Either that or she was having her own difficulties reconciling what should not be with what apparently was very much real. An entire city wiped out in the course of a single night, an explosion of such power and mightiness that it blew a new crater in one of the moons. Meryl imagined that if she closed her eyes, she could still see after-images. And she couldn't explain any of it, not really.

_I've still got sand, in my shoes  
and I can't shake the thought of you. _

"Stay back! You'll get caught up in it too..." the last words he'd said to her echoed back at her (minus the part where he'd gotten his usual goofy, happy-go-lucky self on). She'd wanted to tell him that whatever he was going through didn't matter to her, that she'd still be there for him. Milly had encouraged her to go after him and then... and then...

And then she realized that maybe he'd been _right_ to warn her off after all. Meryl Stryfe, Class A-1 Disaster Investigator could take a lot of things in this world; she could take bandits, and sand-steamer-raids and psycho killers, and shootouts. She could take conspiracies and danger and disasters. She could take sand-slavers and bandit gangs wiping out half a town, families of weirdoes-for-hire trying to bully innocent farmers, and whole sectors that were inexplicably empty of life. What she could not take was the aura of the unexplainable that sometimes seemed to hang around him, like Vash was part of a world _entirely_ different from the one she knew. A world that existed outside of what she accepted as reality. Aside of the bounty-hunters, bandit-gangs, shootouts and disasters that were a "normal" part of his life, there was something about him that Meryl just could not seem to get a handle on. It was like something she always glimpsed just out of the corner of her eye but everytime she turned to look, it was gone! _Now_ she was a little relieved that she'd never had to face whatever-it-was head on. Meryl liked Vash, but she wasn't certain she was ready to see that other world. She wasn't certain she would _ever_ be ready.

_I must get on, forget you  
but why would I want to? _

_Maybe i'm a coward after all_ she thought to herself, feeling a little ashamed of her admission, even if it was only to herself.

She was Meryl Stryfe, she prided herself on her being ready for whatever life threw her way and her ability and competence to handle any situation, no matter how bad it got. But even _she_ had to admit to herself that as a person she tended to get stuck in her ways. She had a system for dealing with things, but she didn't _like_ things that fell outside of her comfort zone. It was a discomfort that bordered on fear. The fear of the unknown was a basic instinctual reaction in every person; fight or flight. Generally Meryl would choose fight, but there was something about all of this unexplained stuff that hung around Vash and to a lesser degree Mister Wolfwood that gave her a case of the shudders. That instinctive chill that went up her spine when she found herself in a neighbor hood that was obviously bad warning her that there were dangerous things around her and she didnt know where they were or how to avoid them.

The incident at Augusta had shown her just how very much the person she was in like with could fall outside of her ability to comprehend. Even Wolfwood, cheerful and somewhat inoffensive (or at least so much that Meryl would allow him to walk down the street alone with Milly and not worry too much about it), gave her that strange feeling up her spine sometimes, an instinctual reaction to him being part of a different world she could not explain nor control. They were both hiding things. Wolfwood had _known_ something about what was going to happen, about what had _been_ happening. Meryl had no proof beyond suspicion but she could just _feel_ it. And that feeling, frankly, scared her a little. The words "in a league of their own" never rang more true.

_I know we said goodbye,  
anything else would have been confused but  
I want to see you again._

But despite all of the mess and danger and the vague feeling of unease she got everytime Vash pulled off an inexplicable victory and tried to just laugh it off... she missed him. The thought that she would never see his idiot smile again or hear his voice (even when he said things he _knew_ she would have to hit him for... she was beginning to think he was doing it on purpose just to get her riled up) really bothered her. She didn't really want to go into the reasons _why_ it might bother her so much, those thoughts too could lead to places she wasn't sure she wanted to go. As long as she didn't have to admit it to herself then everything was just fine. She'd gotten pretty good at ignoring things she didn't want to have to face up to, Vash and all of the weird things that happened that she never inquired too closely about had been good practice.

Her boss seemed happy with the reports she sent back, which contained, even she had to admit, just the surface of things. They concentrated on trivialities and the appearences of the events rather than trying to explain just how he'd managed to do some of the things he'd done. The company wasn't so much concerned with explanations as it was with "how much will this cost us, and why couldn't you prevent it?" anyway.

_Tomorrows back to work  
and down to sanity,  
_  
Tomorrow it would be back to the daily grind, she'd put on the same clothes she always wore and walk to the office building where she worked and sit down at her desk and start working her way through the mountainous stacks of paper that were likely waiting there for her. There would be no more weirdness, no more inexplicable events, no more...

"Vash..." she murmured into the silence of the room.

Despite all of the frustration and confusion he had caused her, Meryl had to admit that she would miss him. She wished she could see him, just one more time. She hadn't even gotten to really say goodbye to him, she'd been about to say something, something that might have changed the nature of thier relationship, something that would have clued him in to the fact that she felt something slightly more than frustration and an occasional fondness with him. Something more than just an insurance worker and her assignment, perhaps even something more than a friend, but he'd stopped her before she could say anything. Part of her was relieved and a little grateful, but the other part of her felt... regret. She was a little disappointed that she hadn't gotten a chance to tell him how much she'd come to care about him.

_should run a bath and then clear up  
the mess I made before I left here._

She mentally tucked that part of her life away and filed it under things that had once been, and no longer were, a part of her reality. Her reality from this point on would consist of the same grinding boring activities that had taken place before she'd gone on a series of strange adventures with an infamous outlaw. She'd go back to the regular, ordinary sane life she'd left behind when she'd traveled into the sands. She'd knock the dust off her shoes, possibly run a nice, hot luxurious bubble bath to wash the grit of travel off from her and go to bed. When she woke up in the morning it would be like the last year or so of her life had been nothing more than a long, strange dream. She'd go back to her office, and start on her paperwork, and possibly, someday, forget all about him. That would be the sensible thing to do, the safe thing to do. But for once in her life Meryl wanted to be neither of those two things.

_Try to remind myself that I was happy here  
before I knew that I could get on a plane  
and fly away  
from the road where the cars never stop going through the night  
to a life where I can watch the sunset, and take my time, take all our time... _

She knew she'd been happy there once, in her nice, safe, boring little life. She'd worked her way through college, hired as an intern at Bernardelli's and then, once she'd gotten her degree, had been hired on a permanent basis by the cheif. She'd saved enough money to put a down payment on a modest little home near the place where she worked, decorated it just the way she liked and used the kitchen to support her cooking hobby.

_Two weeks away, is all it takes,  
to change and turn me around, I've fallen  
I walked away,  
And never said,  
That I wanted to see you... again._

When not squirreled away in her office, she'd generally taken her work home with her, except on those nights when Milly or one of the girls had told her "you spend too much time alone, you'll turn funny" and had dragged her out to a bar or resteraunt or the park or bowling. By her own standards she'd been successful in life, it was a modest sort of successful but still, it was successful. And if she had indeed been a little solitary she hadn't always planned on staying that way, she'd had the vague idea of, sometime in the distant hazy future, finding a nice quiet man to settle down with, moving to the claims department (or some other department that would keep her in town) and having a few kids. A nice, simple life. And then she'd met _him_.

Nothing was simple anymore.

_I've still got sand, in my shoes  
and I can't shake the thought of you._

She just couldn't seem to forget him. Even though she was back home in her nice safe little comfort-box, surrounded by the things that she'd previously loved the most it just didn't seem to have any meaning to her anymore. Her mind kept flashing back to that instant out there on the cliff where she'd been about to say something, her heart had lifted and she thought she'd finally found the nerver to tell him but then he'd stopped her and sent her away. And then when she'd followed him anyway (it was her job after all) she'd seen something that she hadn't been prepared to see. To be honest, no-one could have been prepared to see such a thing; it was an event that in all ways was inexpicable and Meryl was still struggling to come to grips with it. First the city had been there, empty but there. Then there was a huge flash of blue-white light that turned night into day and spilt opn the sky and scorched the moons. And then once her eyes cleared enough for her to see, all that was left was rubble and an enormous crater of glassed-over slag.

_I must get on, forget you  
but why would I want to?_

Milly and Meryl had searched through the ruins calling for him but hadn't found him, so either he was dead (and she just couldn't believe that, despite the magnitude of the explosion) or he was still unconscious, or he just plain didn't want to answer. If it was the latter she bop him a good one if she ever found him again. And she wanted to believe deep down that she would see him again. Oddly enough, with the thought that she might someday see him again that vague feeling of unease and discomfort that had come with her returning home to find that nothing (and everything) had changed dissolved. It wasn't good-bye forever, it was only good-bye for now. In this life there were meetings and partings, and someday, if she wanted to enough, she would see him again. But for now, it was well enough to let it rest.

_I know we said good bye,  
anything else would have been confused  
but, I want to see you again. _

**_Pssst! Please leave a contribution in the little box. (reveiw)_**


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